I use VMWare. Is it possible to upload VMware disk images and use them on the ElasticHosts system?

Our system requires either DVD or CD images in .iso format, or raw disk images – the equivalent of taking the stream of bytes off a physical disk and saving them in a file. A .vmdk file is a long way from raw format. However, qemu does have tools to convert these.

On a Linux system, you can use the following command to convert a .vmdk into a raw disk image that our system can use:

$ qemu-img convert inputfilename.vmdk -O raw outputfilename.raw

Be aware that a raw image is probably larger than the .vmdk, which is a compressed format.

Mac users can also perform this conversion using Oracle’s VirtualBox, by running the following commands in Terminal: